CATEGORIES

The Dark Origins of Impressionism

How the violence and deprivation of war inspired light-filled masterpieces

The Magic Mountain Saved My Life

When I was young and adrift, Thomas Manns novel gave me a sense of purpose. Today, its vision is startlingly relevant.

The Weirdest Hit in History

How Handel's Messiah became Western music's first classic

Culture Critics

Nick Cave Wants to Be Good \"I was just a nasty little guy.\"

ONE FOR THE ROAD

What I ate growing up with the Grateful Dead

Teaching Lucy

She was a superstar of American education. Then she was blamed for the country's literacy crisis. Can Lucy Calkins reclaim her good name?

A BOXER ON DEATH ROW

Iwao Hakamada spent an unprecedented five decades awaiting execution. Each day he woke up unsure whether it would be his last.

HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA

THE MERITOCRACY ISN'T WORKING. WE NEED SOMETHING NEW.

Against Type

How Jimmy O Yang became a main character

DISPATCHES

HOW TO BUILD A PALESTINIAN STATE There's still a way.

Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave

On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.

The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.

It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.

"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.

Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.

Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.

What Zoya Sees

Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.

Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg

The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.

Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England

In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.

Scent of a Man

In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?

THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT

In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.

The Playwright in the Age of AI

In his new play, McNeal, Ayad Akhtar confronts, and subverts, the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.

Is Forgiveness Possible?

Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda

Books- Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve - She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.

Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I've known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung, Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd, her 2021 essay collection. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades. As a girl in San Francisco's Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as ratty delinquents-kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene. Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers' drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories.

Men on Trips Eating Food - Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants

As a reverse foodie-a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don't-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie'm not exactly a target viewer for the eating-and-traveling shows. I'm happy sitting behind my stacked up cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, reading Frederick Seidel. But now and again I'm touched; an image or a moment from one of these shows will move me.

What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors - In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.

Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so

Mapping Mississippi's Violent Past - I wanted to understand the forces that shaped my state's dark history. I ended up in Spain, holding an object I'd never known existed.

I'd come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow.

A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari - How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru

"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.

Boat Fish Don't Count

The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass

The Anti-Rock Star

Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism

You Think You're So Heterodox

Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.